AIMSTER!

Raise your hand for this charter school

November 12, 2007

Can you imagine folk who went down with the Titanic standing still while a boat that could have saved even a few of them went sailing by? They would have grabbed the opportunity.

That's the attitude Detroit needs to apply to news that the nation's premiere network of college prep charter schools, the Houston-based Knowledge Is Power Program, will be accepting proposals, early next year, to see where it will launch its next school in 2010.

Detroit Public Schools Superintendent Connie Calloway and the entire Board of Education ought to be working with local foundations to ready the most thunderous pitch in the nation. Calloway, who has talked of systematic change, could start in a big way if she led the charge to make the proven KIPP an option in Detroit.

Don't be too proud to beg. Make the case for taxpayers who deserve viable school choices and for the 60% of DPS students who, every year, become dropouts instead of hopeful high school graduates.

Based on a presentation I heard KIPP cofounder Mike Feinberg give recently at Cobo Hall, the children of Detroit are no more challenging than those KIPP has helped to succeed at 57 academies in 17 states and Washington, D.C. They generally hail from the same sort of tough situations. Eighty percent of Kipsters, as they're called, are poor, and they're overwhelmingly African American or Latino.

The giant difference: Nearly 80% of KIPP eighth graders become college students. That's an outcome KIPP schools work hard to build, via eight-hour school days, two to three hours of homework, and Saturday and summer classes, too.

The payoff is evident in the education snapshots of KIPP students. Kipsters who started fifth grade in 2000, for example, were ranked only in the 34th percentile in reading and the 44th percentile in math. By eighth grade, those same students' scores had climbed to 58th in reading and 83rd in math.

Pushing for KIPP, as I am, doesn't mean I'm clueless. I know KIPP is no education messiah. Over the years, KIPP has severed ties with five schools that failed to meet its standards.

As Feinberg reminded the Cobo crowd: "There are no shortcuts."

And let's be clear, school politics can mess anything up before it gets started. But there also is room in Michigan's convoluted chartering law for DPS, or any other chartering agent in the city, to start a KIPP academy.

The question is whether DPS's board can grow the guts to support KIPP's philosophy of giving school personnel "the power to lead," which is code for decision-making at the building, not bureaucratic, level.

If universities such as Central Michigan and Ferris State, leading charter authorizers, are smart, they'll seize this opportunity, too. Any one of them could help a KIPP designee land one of the 14 available contracts to operate an Urban High School Academy in Detroit. KIPP would train the school's principal through a year-long fellowship program, including internships at other KIPP schools.

I'm not advocating the demise of DPS, of which I am a proud graduate. I want to see the district succeed for the children, and for the citizens who've taxed themselves to no end to help DPS compete. Teachers are working to raise standards every day, but they can't undo the DPS bureaucracy that has cosigned for decades the city's culture of educational failure.

The only idea Detroit can't afford to consider is status quo. That one has already sentenced too many children to lives of less than they deserve.

On the net: www.kipp.org/07.

NICHOLE M. CHRISTIAN is an editorial writer. Contact her at 313-222-6456 or nchristian@freepress.com.